THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION has been putting pressure on Pakistan to investigate any network which supported Osama bin Laden while he lived in seclusion at his Abbottabad compound.
Pakistan’s prime minister has denied knowing that the al-Qaeda leader was living in Abbottabad and said he had not been warned in advance of the US raid.
In an interview with CBS yesterday, Obama said that while bin Laden must have had a support network in Pakistan, it wasn’t clear if people inside Pakistan’s government were part of that network. He said it was “something that we have to investigate and, more importantly, the Pakistanti government has to investigate”.
Obama said he was surprised about the proximity of a Pakistani military base to bin Laden’s compound:
There had been discussions that this guy might be hiding in plain sight. And we knew that some al-Qaeda operatives, high level targets, basically just blended into the crowd like this.I think we were surprised when we learned that this compound had been there for five or six years and that it was in an area in which you would think that potentially he would attract some attention. So yes, the answer is that we were surprised that he could maintain a compound like that for that long without there being a tip off.
He said the building has been specifically built to ensure that no one passing or living nearby could look in.
The LA Times reports that the US is pushing for access to Obama’s three wives as part of an investigation into bin Laden’s life. The women, and eight of bin Laden’s children, have been in the custody of Pakistani authorities since last weekend’s raid.
Concerns
Former Irish President and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson has voiced her concerns over the manner in which bin Laden was killed.
Speaking to the BBC’S Sunday Sequence radio show yesterday, Robinson said she shared the Archbishop of Canterbury’s “moral unease” over the killing. She said that, given he was reportedly unarmed at the time of the raid, he should have been arrested:
I would have preferred if somebody is unarmed and can be captured and taken into custody to be brought to justice, that a great democracy would do that.
However, she said there was not information about the circumstances of the incident yet to say if human rights were breached.
Meanwhile, media in Pakistan today claim to have identified the CIA’s station chief in Islamabad. The AP reports that the name released today is incorrect, but that the CIA pulled its previous station chief out of Pakistan after a name alleged to be his was reported in Pakistani media.
- Additional reporting by the AP
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